Smartphone Security Startup Lookout Crosses Two Million Users

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, September 9th, 2010


Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, is growing rapidly. Less than two months after the startup surpassed one million users, the company has crossed the 2 million registered users mark. It took just over six months to reach 1 million users.

Lookout, which recently raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have made consumers aware of the security threats on mobile phones.

While smartphone use is growing rapidly, there are security risks associated with the increased data and application usage on these devices. Similar to a PC, users need to protect their phones from malware, viruses, data loss and more. Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

Lookout also recently launched the App Genome Project which identifies applications that carry the same characteristics of established dangerous applications, quickly isolate them, and protect users. To date, Lookout has analyzed over 300,000 apps.

In less than one year in business, the company has also found lost or stolen phones for users more than 700,000 times, with a phone found every 15 seconds over the past two months. And Lookout has backed-up over 130 million photos and backed-up over 625 million contacts.

Lookout is of course riding on the growth in smartphone adoption, and the increased use of apps on these phones. For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

Company: Lookout Inc.
Website: lookout.com
Launch Date: 2007
Funding: $76M

Lookout is a security technology company dedicated to making the Post-PC world safer for everyone. We develop software that secures personal devices, protects the BYOD workforce and defends mobile infrastructure and networks. To address the unique security challenges of the Post-PC era, we take a different approach, tackling security as a data problem. We’ve created the world’s largest mobile data set and combined it with the power of our 40 million users to build a powerful cloud-based protection platform. Lookout...

→ Learn more

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus